As You Like It: Jacque or Rosalind?

In As You Like It, we are made to sympathize with three seemingly incompatible characters: Jacques, who is a raving cynic, Orlando, who is a raving idealist, and Rosalind, who is down to earth but not stuck there. Jacques is disgusted with the many characters who fall in love, and says that they have gone mad.

It is tempting to side with Jacques when he starts complaining about the madness of those in love. They are, after all, acting quite out of their wits. Things like hanging poems on trees, claiming that one girl can posses all the virtues and none of the vices of the most acclaimed women in mythology and history, pretending to be what they aren’t, and many other such oddities become commonplace when the characters fall in love. Jacques would have us believe that they have lost their senses, and ought to be whipped until they find them. He would have them prefer earth to heaven because the heaven that they have found is intangible.

Some would dub Jacques a realist for this preference of the tangible world. The proper title for such a man, however, is cynic. Humans are more than the carbon and water that their physical bodies consist of. As You Like It itself is evidence for the fact that humans have been given imaginations, minds, and emotions. Humans are also not solitary creatures. We need love.

Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone, Celia and the others who happily fall in love are the happy ones. They have something that Jacques doesn’t have and doesn’t even want, love. He claims that the others are mad as he stubbornly chooses to be unhappy and ‘sane’. It would seem that he chooses what he thinks is reality over love.

The dichotomy that Jacques faces is not as real as he thinks it is. It is possible to be a realist and still be an idealist. He doesn’t have to choose between reality and love. Rosalind is well aware that women are not all that Orlando has been taught that they are, so she carefully works to instruct him in who she really is. She loves him, but she is also capable of dealing with reality. Jacque is less of a realist than Rosalind because she sees reality enough to understand that it is worth loving.